


Valence

by Mizufae



Category: Merlin (BBC), Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Community: kinkme_merlin, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-23
Updated: 2011-02-23
Packaged: 2017-10-15 21:27:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizufae/pseuds/Mizufae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the prompt "Merlin can see everyone's auras, but likes Arthur's the best." Wherein Merlin is studying string theory at the University of California: Santa Barbara, Gwen fights with robots, there are many colors, and Merlin might be completely crazy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Valence

When one is a physics major at UC: Santa Barbara, specializing in subatomic structure and (the becoming rapidly disproved) string theory, one does not admit to magical powers. Sure, his pagan friends in the LGBTQ might like to smudge a sage stick around, but Merlin's fairly certain that, were he to start explaining the _auras_ , they'd take him to the university health clinic. And although his mentor, Doctor G. Freeman, is an openly religious man, he is rigorously rational in his adoration of the universe.

Auras are anything but rational, and try as he might to explain his occasional telekinesis through quantum fluctuations, Merlin has come up with bunk. It's best to keep it all to himself. Part of him knows he might be insane, should probably tell a psychiatrist, has spent late nights reading terrifying PubMed articles on hallucinations. But the rest of him thinks, well? Is it harmful? Is it changing his life drastically? Is it something worth fighting?

No. If anything, the auras bring Merlin more beauty than most can imagine. (And the telekinesis seriously helps with finding his socks - all he has to do is lift up all his furniture and peer at the ground.)

They hover like shells around a sentience. Dogs have them, the dolphins that swim out in the Santa Barbara channel have them, even bees have them, although the bee auras string and drag between one another - almost like honey - dripping in the scented pathways they use to communicate with one another, hovering in the air like ropes of thought.

Merlin wonders about the people, why they all seem so unique. Does he notice the differences in human auras because he's more attuned to human consciousness? Or do all dolphins really have such teal and magenta personalities, like a Lisa Frank poster made real? He supposes that maybe, if your life consists of nothing but swimming, playing, catching fish and having sex, you would become rather magenta and teal yourself.

He's not sure what his aura looks like, or if he has one at all. Mirrors don't reflect them, neither do photos, and when he looks down at his hands - pale, thin, smudged with dry erase markers - they never glimmer, flash or glow. This is how he knew the auras weren't normal for everybody, when he was small and first learning that others didn't see things as he did. The plainness of his own body shocks himself at times, especially in the shower. How can anybody go through life not seeing the auras, not enjoying the miraculous rainbows of being around each person? It must be like a world without sunsets.

Santa Barbara is most certainly filled with sunsets. The small city swells with tourists all throughout the year, the university students balancing their absence in the winters. The curving crescent beaches, the green slopes of the mountains, the cool, sweeping winds all serve to cosset the population in an enduring sense of place. When Merlin first transferred there, from a small community college in Montana, finally having won a scholarship, he had taken at least three months just getting used to the views waiting around every corner.

Friends had been hard. He'd missed freshman year, and, without that crucial period of forced bonding, had fallen into a ragtag crowd of mixed students. Gwen was an EE major, whip-smart and ready to electrocute anybody who dared make fun of a chick who built robots. She'd rammed straight into Merlin on his second day, distracted as he was by a cascade of pink camelias draped over a stone bench, as she was by worry from the competition next week, half a mechanical arm skittering across the cement, mingling with Merlin's papers as they fluttered down.

"Oh! Oh I'm so sorry!" She'd immediately begun to gather his work. Merlin knelt down and prodded the arm, a wire jutting out at an unhealthy looking angle. After stuttering apologies on both their parts, an offer from Merlin to help her rewire the joints between knuckles, and a reciprocal offer of lunch, they'd become fast friends.

Gwen wasn't short for anything, she'd said, it was Gwen, just Gwen. Merlin had nodded, chewing through his avocado-heavy sandwich. Why did they put avocados on everything in this town? Her hair was curly and glossy, and the freckles spanning her nose and cheeks set off her chestnutty tan. She'd asked him to come to her robot battle the next week, and Merlin happily accepted the invitation.

The copper sparks in her aura told him she would be a fierce competitor, and the purple flourishes that floated through, like windblown silk scarves, reminded Merlin of the lavender sachets his mother would tuck into her cedar drawers with the winter blankets. The golden yellow flares that emerged, when Gwen talked about her team, and when she mentioned her friend Morgan (a boyfriend? Merlin had wondered), said that she'd be the sort of friend to give you a kidney if you needed one. He'd found himself so grateful, then, for the auras. He knew when to stick with a good thing, and they were telling him, quite clearly, that Gwen was one such person.

But after Gwen, there had been a dry spell. Sure, he'd been to the competitions and cheered as she won, hugging her afterwards and grabbing some drinks with the team, but he'd needed to go home and work some proofs. Theoretical physics wasn't exactly the easiest major. And making up a bunch of missed transfer credits was no cakewalk. It wasn't until Gwen dragged him to some kind of mysterious club meeting that he made further progress.

Morgan, it turned out, was not Gwen's boyfriend. She was sort of Gwen's idol, however. She was the fiercely proud pansexual president of the LGBTQ chapter on campus, with close-cropped hair and bright red lips. The club meeting wasn't exactly an ambush so much as a highly roundabout way for Gwen to ask if Merlin was gay. After initial annoyance, he'd shed his fear from a lifetime of midwestern discretion, and confirmed everyone's suspicions.

"Good on you. We'll have you sorted in no time," Morgan had said in a pleased tone, and made eyes at a cluster of brightly dressed guys on the other end of the room. One of them perked up, gave Merlin the once-over. He had a pointy chin and a leather vest with floppy, deliberately mussed brown hair, with a poorly grown goatee. Merlin considered him for a moment, but, well, his aura was awfully murky. Stone colors shot through with pale greens and, as the man winked rakishly, a lustful cast of maroon tinged his face. Merlin had sat down next to Gwen and asked Morgan where she got her hair cut, instead.

Morgan makes it a habit now, to show up and drag Merlin out of his rooms, away from his whiteboards. She tries to involve him in protests, tries to pull him into debates about politics, says she wants to make him a man of action instead of a man of science. Merlin always retorts that science is action, and babbles about super-colliders until she shuts up. But he's quite fond of her, all the same.

Her aura can be a bit scary, crackling with strong black lightning-like lines, but Merlin knows that just means she's going to be one of the people who makes changes in the world. Give her ten years, he thinks, and Prop 8 will be a distant, regretful memory. The rich, verdant emerald that wraps around her, especially at the shoulders like a cloak, and the tips of her long fingers, tells him that she's drawing from a deep well of personal conviction, and he knows that the ruby flashes that sometimes burst and melt like overripe currants means she's not just fighting the powers that be out of anger. She does it from love. Isn't that the finest motivation of all?

She hauls him from his acetone-scented math-cave and instead of the usual sit-in or picket line or bar, Merlin finds himself ensconced in a velvety booth seat at a large Chinese restaurant.

"Father, do you remember me telling you about my friend Merlin?"

The man across from Merlin is utterly imposing. The aura isn't black but it might as well be, the dim lighting of the restaurant doing nothing to brighten things up. He sees ripples of blood red, shots of dark, vibrating purple, and striations of green that ooze sluggishly around the man. He's wearing a very well-cut navy suit and Merlin wonders what he's doing in a Chinese restaurant, considering Merlin's non-existant history with chopsticks and clean shirts.

The strangest thing of all, about the man who turns out to be called Uther Pendragon, Morgan's step-father, is the spidery light around his head. It hovers like a spiked halo, gold and white, or maybe like Uther's aura was an eggshell and this was the crack that resulted after someone whacked a spoon to the top of his head. It's almost, but not quite, like a crown, and every time Merlin tries to make eye contact with him, he has to look away because the thorny halo makes his eyes prickle.

What had made Uther's aura this way? Merlin doesn't dare ask. He makes quiet, unassuming small talk, and eventually figures out that he's there as a beard.

Morgan, the mistress of sexual freedom, the number one orientation orientater, needing a beard? It shocks Merlin and he stares as Morgan's normally vital, pulsing aura is frozen into stillness. All the while, she eats and talks with her mouth full, sharing cheerfully about her work in environmental law. The feeling of uneasiness that takes hold in the back of Merlin's mind doesn't stop until Morgan's mouth does. Then, she looks past Uther and towards the doorway. Her eyes light up and the berry-like jewels in her aura start to twist and shift again. "Arthur! You made it!" she shouts, causing a brief lull in the background hum of the restaurant, and waves her chopsticks about wildly.

The man who quickly approaches their booth takes Merlin's breath away.

He's never, ever seen anything like it, and until the piece of lemon chicken drops with a splut onto his plate he must have been staring unabashedly. Arthur slides into the booth, next to Uther and directly across from Merlin.

"Sorry I'm late. Debate went way too long. Tried to get Vivian to come along but by the time I was done with model Uzbekistan, she'd run off to wash her hair." Arthur's lip curls with distaste and he seems to take Merlin in for the first time. "You've got sauce on your shirt." He points, and Merlin tries futilely to dab at the spot with some tea.

"Arthur, be nice. This is Merlin." Morgan introduces them, patting Merlin's arm and rubbing along his elbow in a manner that suggests she'd like Uther to think they're having sex with each other. He lightly shakes her off. Arthur is Morgan's step-brother, a Poli Sci grad student on campus, and Merlin has never seen him before because he, in Morgan's words, "runs with _entirely_ the wrong crowd."

Merlin doesn't give half a damn about what crowd Arthur runs in, as long as he can keep drinking in his aura.

It's not prickling like Uther's, but Arthur has a crown as well. It's gold, like pulsing concentric rings, and feathers out into little tendrils around his temples, breathing in time with some function of reality Merlin suspects he could calculate, given infinite whiteboard space, computing capacity, and typewriter monkeys. He's wreathed in royal and azure blues - matching eyes, he notes - and carnelian reds, jeweled along his jaw and banding his chest in a ribbon-like sash. When Arthur leans in to heap noodles onto his plate, or pour his father more tea, the hues shimmer with iridescence, and crystalline glimmers of rainbow spark out with his movements.

The rest of dinner is shot. Afterwards, Merlin is certain that Arthur suspects he is mute. Uther probably finds him milky and unworthy of his daughter. Morgan sends him a frown, and later, a text that reads: "sry 4 awks @ dinner, Uthers a monster."

It turns out, Uther is a man of science himself. He's a patron of the university - Merlin's scholarship is the "Pendragon Merit Scholarship", Merlin's mentor, Doctor Gaius Freeman, is one of his oldest associates, and he's given ungodly amounts of money to improve the university's reputation. "And route out those wishy washy hippy leftovers from the sixties," Morgan explains in a startling imitation of Uther's voice.

Morgan had brought him to dinner to placate Uther's annoyance at her politics. It hadn't worked. The jig was entirely up, the dinner had been useless. "Don't worry, darling," she pats him on the arm again, gives him a little, unasked for, cuddle, "it wasn't your fault."

Merlin finds that he doesn't mind the disaster part of dinner. At night, he closes his eyes and remembers the glimmering, breathing work of art that Arthur had projected. Was he going crazier than normal? The other man certainly hadn't impressed him with his manners or his attitude. But his math seems solid, still, and in a world where even zeros have a probability of being ones at least some of the time, that's as good and sane as Merlin supposes he can expect.

Years later, when Arthur learns the truth to why Merlin pursued and put up with him, handled his repeated attempts at a political career and fought right alongside him in arguments with Uther, after stalker ex-girlfriends and an ill-considered one night stand with Gwen, after crises of confidence and at least seven emotional breakdowns, Arthur laughs.

"You love me for my aura?" Merlin nods, then shakes his head, tries to explain. "And here I thought, all along, it was for my body." Arthur rolls his eyes and leans in for a kiss over cooling pancakes.

They're sitting in their breakfast nook, the picture windows framing the coral and heather sunrise. When Merlin pulls away, Arthur's aura curls gently around his pale hand in the brassy hair, wrapping red and cobalt and opalescent golden streaks that travel down his wrist. He wonders, if he spent long enough tangled up in Arthur, if he'd get the aura to stay stuck to himself. Merlin looks quite forward to finding out.


End file.
